All The Money I've Spent On My '$4500' Lexus... So Far

It's a journey, not a destination

featuring, ahem, “oriental” floormats

Yesterday I shared the good news: my 2001 Lexus ES300 is back on the ground and ready to roll, minus a couple small adjustments and fixes to take place in the upcoming weeks.

Today I’ll share the bad news: what it’s cost.

the very definition of a “fifty-footer”

Of course, Substack doesn’t offer anything as advanced as spreadsheet formatting for your money (or the fees they charge me), so I’ll give it to you as a long, awful list. Couple of lists, actually.

Most of the parts

Original purchase$4,500.00
Engine absorber$121.65
Intake hoses$17.63
Water pump$56.89
Timing Belt$168.79
Belt$13.42
Belt$15.57
Motor mount$37.79
cabin air$14.73
idler bolt$3.83
shocks$105.42
shocks x2$215.00
timing cover$4.47
valve gasket$19.24
shock bellow$18.40
shock mount$59.58
spark plugs$38.82
Front Brake kit$92.79
Tires$506.56
Taillight$104.99
Cup holder$48.26
Floormats$170.75
Lug bolts$27.23
Tie Rods$50.17
Axles$177.07
ATF$55.46
Evap canister$43.00
Rear pads and rotors$152.72
License plate frame$24.66
Rear brake kit$109.99
Motor mount$83.99
Fluid Pan Gasket$6.55
Gasket Set$37.79
Front shocks$249.58
Intake gasket$60.79
Cam Seals$11.94
Swaybar links$49.58
Hood shocks$17.28
Crankshaft seal$22.01
Trans filter$13.61
Ship&Tax$102.74
Dogbone $51.70
Hydraulic table$423.92
Radiator$164.34
Swaybar bushing$9.09
Trans mount$57.99
Water hose$23.51
O2 Sensor$125.79
Steering Rack$347.79
Exhaust Gasket$47.16
PCV4.69
Timing Cover$26.79
Exhaust Gasket$22.06
Windshield repair kit$13.27
Left rear brake caliper $103.30

The alert reader will see six shocks on that list, because two of them didn’t quite fit for reasons we still can’t figure out. My general philosophy when selecting parts was:

• Get the OEM if it’s in any way affordable, which it basically never was

• Get the best RockAuto had to offer unless it was 2x the price of the next best option

• Buy from local parts stores when absolutely necessary

I don’t list any extra supplies like towels, Brakleen, grease, Loctite, and so on. I did add the Harbor Freight hydraulic table, because the Lexus specifically required it. We’ve always used an engine hoist in every other car I have serviced here at my shop, but because the axles were frozen into the engine mounts, we had to unbolt and drop everything together through the bottom of the car.

The total parts cost was

$4,552.14

with probably another $200 of random items left to go.

I paid Firestone $423.36 to mount four tires and perform a “lifetime” alignment which in this case means at least two alignments, one before all the new suspension and one after. We did toe in the shop but I’d rather have the rest done out of house. Which brings the parts and service total to

$4,975.50.

The car cost me $4,500 to begin with. Adding tax and title to the above, we have a subtotal of

$9,886.25.

This is a 2001 ES300 with 169,300 miles. What could we get for my subtotal?

That’s a 2010 ES350 with 78,178 miles, and I’m not cherrypicking here. Plenty of nice cars like this in the $9k-10k range. But wait, there’s more, because the phrase “parts and labor” exists for a reason, and I’ve forgotten to include most of the labor!

Here’s where the discussion of privilege comes in. Ten years ago, when discussing the “cheap” Lexus owned by my pal Matt Farah, I said that “you gotta be rich to own a cheap car.” That was an LS400 with nearly a million miles, but much of the same caution and skepticism should be applied to my ownership of this ES300. To begin with, once we realized the whole mechanical underside of the car was a mess I was able to leave it on jackstands for nearly a hundred days and drive my other cars. Even though I sold my Milan and gave my Accord to my son during that time, I still had a half-dozen other options in the garage, at a minimum.

That’s privilege, of course.

Next up in the “lucky me” category: I estimate that we have close to 100 man-hours in the refresh of this car, from the obvious (remove engine and transmission, install new seals, timing belt service, full suspension replacement) to the less obvious (polish headlights, wire-brush and paint corrosion in the engine bay). Most independent shops charge $90 an hour now, so that’s nine grand worth of labor.

The way we did the Lexus was a little different. I have a rotating crew of mechanics who work on the six race cars belonging to me, my wife, and my daughter. Most of them are trade-school students or journeymen who take the experience and recommendations they get here and go into IMSA, Radical Cup, and elsewhere. I don’t pay them $90 an hour, because they’re learning on the job and because crewing a Radical SR8 to multiple championships looks better on the resume than being a Jiffy Lube top-filler.

Most weekends I compelled a couple of hours’ Lexus labor on top of the race car stuff, and compensated them via methods ranging from “steak dinner” to “free 1984 Gold Wing”. I didn’t count any of that in my spreadsheet. There were three instances where I directly paid a former crew member to come in and work on the car during the weekends. My total labor charge for that was

$1,075

which brings the total cost for the ES300 up to…

$10,961.25

The car still has a few issues. We need to install a new brake reservoir and bleed the brakes yet again. The left rear needs to come back apart to investigate a knocking noise that is likely the top shock perch. The door speakers of the stereo are either blown or mismounted. The right rear wheel arch is pretty close to needing rust repair. Based on how it sounds, I’m going to count every additional day that the driver’s door window regulator operates as an unearned blessing.

On top of that, there are some “nice-to-haves”. The shift lever and steering wheel could both benefit from a re-cover and the wooden parts of the wheel have a few palpable cracks in the epoxy. The front seats would benefit from new foam and a re-upholster. The headlights are astoundingly bad, at least in comparison with a modern car. The door seals aren’t bad but they aren’t good either. The rest of the car is so quiet the wind noise becomes obvious by contrast.

Fourteen grand total should do it, really.

Which would also get me this:

That’s a no-drama, clean-records 2014 ES350 with 88,106 miles. Any sane person would rather have that car. If any of my readers wants to offer me $10,500 for this Lexus, I will immediately sell it and go buy that Lexus.

Or maybe not. We’ve had a lot of fun with this car since April. Seven different people have wrenched on it — which has caused some predictable problems along the lines of “Did anybody actually install that seal before putting the transmission back on?” — and it’s taught more than a couple lessons to the younger mechanics. You could argue that it’s the most valuable experience I’ve had to offer these kids. There aren’t very many Radical SR8s in the world, but there’s no end of V-6 Toyotas that need service out there and now they’ve “seen the elephant”, as Jeff Cooper would say.

Perhaps the most interesting consequence of buying and fixing this ES300 has been the note I received from one of my readers during the process. He has a nice post-facelift LS430 sitting in his Kansas garage. Younger than this car, fewer miles, better condition. He’d like to sell it… Why do I have eleven cats living in my house right now? Because I firmly believe that animals shouldn’t be separated from their families unless it’s absolutely necessary. By that logic, shouldn’t my long-suffering Lexus have a sibling in the driveway? I mean, how expensive and difficult could it be to operate and repair a nineteen-year-old LS430?

Reader, you already know the answer to that.